> Give me an environment that is alive with all sorts of applications, methods of use...

Yeah, Linux is great for people like us!

> ...and even viruses/trojans any day...

Oh, Windows. Yuck.

Well, if they've created the hardware and the environment and done a lot of brainstorming, experimenting, and researching how to make the design work, maybe they do know better than their users what they want. Most people probably don't spend all their time thinking of new ways to use a phone. If you decide Apple is wrong, just don't buy their products.

I do like open systems (linux/smalltalk/etc.), but then it seems like you still have a choice between using something someone else has designed for you, or doing it yourself. Developers can make systems configurable, but it doesn't seem like configuration options are always that creative, and they can get annoying after a while.

I guess the best thing a designer can do is make systems easy for hackers to extend, but someone is going to have to create a design somewhere, or else the end product isn't going to be very good.

...back in my day, we didn't try to improve on user interfaces or advance the state of the art. We had viruses and trojans and we liked it!

I haven't missed copy and paste. I'm glad that they left it out, because it's another chance to introduce even more bugs into the iPhone (the thing crashes around once every other day).

Yes, it's best not to introduce more features lest they introduce more bugs. Let's just use white shiny plastic boxes connected with a metal cable then, shall we?

I'm not sure what your point is, but I'll take the iPhone the way it is now rather than chance even more bugs. There's no reason to need copy and paste except under extremely specific circumstances that don't come up often.

It's not a laptop.

Actually there is. I use a blackberry which also has a similar feature - if a number on a web page looks like a phone number you can just click it and it will call the number. However I routinely need to copy paste things from one email to another or from a web page to an email.

You may be happy with your iphone, good for you. My point is that you can't call a feature extraneous just because you don't need it and that if you have to reduce features to reduce bugs you have a very serious problem. If your engineers are prone to writing buggy code, the product will be buggy even if it has very few features and vice versa.